Quickly Hide iPhone Keyboard With Pull To Dismiss [Cydia]

Despite being the most popular smartphone platform, iOS comes with a lot of pesky features which can prove to be a bit annoying for the average user. The iPad has a dismiss button on its keyboard, but unfortunately, no such option exists for the iPhone and iPod touch. This might not be too much of a problem if you own one of the later iPhone models as they are pretty quick, but if you have a laggy and old iDevice, things tend to get a bit too slow for most people’s liking. There are many areas of the OS where the keyboard just refuses to budge despite your best efforts, and it is at times like these that you wish there was some easy way of making the keyboard vanish at will. Fortunately, if you own a jailbroken iOS device, you can resolve this minor annoyance with Pull to Dismiss, a Cydia tweak that allows you to dismiss the keyboard with a simple gesture (a downward swipe), no matter where in the OS you currently are. The tweak is really useful because of the fact that it does not rely on a new button for the keyboard’s dismissal, and everything is accomplished via a simple gesture.

The tweak is available in the Big Boss repo, and can be downloaded for free. Once it is installed, you won’t see it in the Settings menu. Pull to Dismiss will show its effects during an OS activity where the keyboard pops up (Notes, Spotlight search etc). If you swipe downwards on the screen anywhere above the keyboard, it will be pulled down and go out of view. The swipe gesture is pretty similar to the scrolling action in iOS, and you just have to go beyond the top of the page and the keyboard will start going down too.

A handy tweak, which might make you forget it’s there after a while, as it gels with the OS without making any changes to the UI. Pull to Dismiss is compatible with all iOS devices running iOS 3.2 or above. If you are thinking that this tweak is something that is only going to be useful for iPhone and iPod touch devices, then think again. Despite the presence of the dismiss button on the iPad’s keyboard, having a gesture for performing the same task appears to be a much more convenient and intuitive way of doing things.